WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Charles Colson, a Richard Nixon White House operative during the Watergate scandal who had a reputation for ruthlessness before going to jail and starting a prison ministry, died on Saturday at age 80, the ministry said.
Colson served as counsel to the president from 1969 to 1973 and a major part of his job was playing hardball politics to assure Nixon's re-election in 1972.
In 1973, Time magazine said Colson "was probably more disliked, as well as feared, than any other White House aide ... If Colson actually performed half the various acts of which he has been accused, he was easily the least principled of all Nixon's associates."
It was in that atmosphere that Colson and others at the top of the White House staff engaged in a series of misadventures and illegal acts that resulted in Nixon resigning the presidency in 1974 in the face of impeachment over the Watergate scandal, which grew out of a 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington.
Colson ended up with a sentence of one to three years in prison but it did not come from a Watergate crime. He had pleaded no contest to obstruction of justice in the break-in of the offices of the psychiatrist to Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times.
ENEMIES' LIST
In 1971, Colson had been the chief author of a memo listing Nixon's major political critics and opponents, including businessmen, members of Congress, journalists and entertainers. When the "enemies list" became public, those included on it - among them actor Paul Newman - wore the mention like a badge of honor and cited the list as a prime example of Nixon's paranoia.
The same year, the president's re-election committee set aside $250,000 to do "intelligence gathering" on Democrats. To lead the program, Colson choose one of his assistants, former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt.
Hunt's group came to be known as "the plumbers" and they participated in a number of questionable and outright illegal events, including the Ellsberg break-in.
Colson had other capers in mind, including starting a fire at the Brookings Institution think tank and breaking into the apartment of the man who tried to assassinate Alabama Governor George Wallace. Such ideas were never carried out.
Then came the break-in that failed when "plumbers" were caught inside the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate complex.
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